My god this is awful. He was brilliant, accomplished, and kind. A few days ago he announced his 'permanent rest' (https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/1599108759183577088). I'd thought it meant from the Ruby community and that the replies asking if he needed help were reading too much into the wording.
Like many mental illnesses, depression interferes with your perceptions. It's not that that love "wasn't enough", it's that a person deep in depression can't even accurately see or feel that love.
Yeah and it is especially hard for high achievers to ask for help or even consider that they should ask for help. I think its completely foreign to them.
Sorry, not trying to be a jerk, but unless there is actual comparative evidence, I don't think one can just assert that high achievers struggle in getting help any more than others.
It should be common knowledge by now, as the problem has been documented for decades and discussed here many times.[1][2][3][4]
As far as an actual citation: "Studies from Kjølseth et al. (2009), and our own findings (Szücs et al., 2020), suggest that older adults who die by suicide or have late-onset (mostly high-medical lethality) suicide attempts are often high-functioning throughout most of their life, and characterized as controlling, rigid, high-achievers, also high on orderliness (a conscientiousness subcomponent)."[5]
i wish some of these super smart people weren't so afraid of the harmless 'woo' that costs next to nothing, like read some old 70s book on primal scream into a pillow or try a radical keto meat diet or weird mental re-framings from people who are total quacks
The internet is full of 60 plus years of this stuff since the 60s, books and lectures and diy reprogramming you can find for free.
random 'outdated' books where 80 percent is fluff i've stumbled on one page of a random client story that just cut through time and space to reach me at that moment. I can't even remember the book title but I still remember the page layout, reading a paragraph at 2am and started bawling after feeling numb all year.
I've pieced together little bits of insight this way and each feel like growth and knowing some secret unconscious part of myself better. You never know what will crack the ice and get thru to you.
like who cares about evidence when that has gotten you nowhere in matters of the mind?
Hell, you can build a life going from placebo insight to insight if that's what it takes to keep on, why would that even be different than the lives on 'normal' people chasing hollow consumer goods?
it's still a life of trying things out to better know yourself and your world, which is plenty meaningful
I think maybe 5% of the time it isn't about love but the other 95% it is. A lot of people really are missing love.
The Netflix Series 13 Reasons Why seems pretty unrealistic except maybe it represents some unusual cases. In that series there are clearly people who cared about her but she was missing the caring of certain people (and I don't fault people for feeling bad because one particular person or a few doesn't like them). A lot of people don't have much loving attention at all though.
Yeah. The guy had what appears to be a pretty great life. Looking through twitter, there's photos of him with his kids and wife.
I just can't comprehend how someone can arrive at the decision to commit suicide, especially when you have a wife and children, and to then tweet about it. The human mind is an odd thing.
What's always resonated with me is David Foster Wallace's description, thinking of it as a decision is not the right way to look at it.
"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
Trust me, been there tried to do that (June 1977 — I woke up several days later intubated/on a ventilator in the ICU). It's completely logical when you're profoundly depressed. If you haven't been there then you "just can't comprehend..."
I'm glad you made it through that experience, and hope that things have improved considerably since then.
I've never been seriously suicidal, but I did have a period of bad depression/OCD where I experienced what I later learned is called "derealization", where I felt cut off from everything in life and as though I was viewing the world through frosted glass. Once I received help and left that state, I was struck by how much it felt that everything I cared about was already gone. I can only imagine there's a similar feeling when people die by suicide.
When I had refractory major depression it felt like a terminal illness. I often hoped I'd get hit by a car or someone would kill me in a mugging. When you're depressed, people also often treat you like you have leprosy. However, now I struggle to empathize with others who are going through the same thing.
Thankfully I found medication and life changes that worked, especially moving to a sunny climate. I also recommend sobriety, it stops a vicious cycle with depression and dependence.
When I've been in that place, other people's kindness can feel like evidence that I'm hurting them -- that I'm drawing energy from them, that I'm a hole in the world that needs to be repaired but can't, that kind of thing. (That isn't to say that such displays of appreciation and love can't also be helpful and welcomed.)
Indeed. The human mind is wildly talented at lying to us in sometimes sinister ways.
It's hard to imagine if you haven't been there, but in the moment you are seriously thinking about it, your mind can truly convince you that your family/spouse/kids/friends/work/church/etc will all be better off without you, even though that is virtually never true. Don't trust your mind when it tells you things like that.
It's not a choice. It's not seen as a choice. The Choice is not between life-and-death but between suffering and ending your suffering. This is how the suicidal mind thinks. When suffering becomes greater than any other emotion it It's like a pressure that has to be relieved
"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
The problem with this analogy is that it, in life, any problem representing fire is going to change. Aside from terminal illness. Wallace didn’t have the perspective to see that.
I would have to agree with you, from personal experience. About 5 years ago I believe I might have overdosed by mixing OTC medication by accident, it was a combination of neurotropics and other focus medicine or at least after reflecting on the whole ordeal I believe this to be the case. I’ve never been one to consider suicide, never understood how someone could take their own life but at that specific moment in my life I felt that I was literally losing my mind and at any moment could go crazy and I would rather kill myself than to go crazy. So to touch on what you said, even a person that would never, ever do that under any circumstances within a sound mind can absolutely do it if the pain or suffering is so severe that killing one’s self is the only way one can save one’s self from what they’re going through.
I learned through that experience that the mind can be so fragile. My situation was induced from over the counter medicine. My heart goes out to individuals that have to deal with something like this due to mental disease… it really is something that affects everyone one way or another.
My friend who suffers from depression said it was basically being in emotional pain all the time. She said she has thought a few times that ending her life would stop the pain. It's a horrible form of mental illness. It's pervasive and while she has a grip on it now, it's something she struggles with often.
I also have a friend who committed suicide a few years ago. He had 2 kids but as his other friends described, he had his demons since he was a kid. I wish I could have helped him more.
